Jockers … has devised a method of comparing thousands of books to one another in order to find systems of influence, schools of thought and other groupings that may not be obvious to literary theorists. He calls it macroanalysis. . . . His system processed thousands of digital books from the 19th- and late 18th centuries — a period chosen because the works are free, plentiful and subject to a wealth of theory already. The books are examined on dozens of measures, from word choice to punctuation to overarching theme. The end result is a unique “book signal” that allows it to be compared to other books and eventually plotted in a sort of similarity space, where closely related books are near one another, and differing books are distant.

“At times [Ramsay] argues that however alien algorithmic criticism may seem, it is really a technologically ramped up version of what literary criticism has always been. Although the rhetoric of traditional literary criticism emphasizes getting at the truth about a text as its end point, in practice what critics do is try out one hypothesis, and then another, and in the process re-characterize or deform the text.